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Sunday, October 24, 2010

For my last practical experience I messed around with the blending options for the layers and using the opacity and the transform for each duplicated layer to create a cool little effect as our school motto was being used in a logo. I was putting something together for a Google site and wanted to mess around a little in Photoshop and using the blending options I was able to create a cool effect using the opacity and some bevel and emboss on the text.

Using the magnetic lasso tool in Photoshop has made a world of difference and cut my time in editing photos down by a large amount. I was using the pen tool before and in a situation like in this photo, the magnetic lasso tool works so much faster.

I have been wanting to do a lot in Photoshop as of late, trying to create logos and flyers for different things going on around school and for different websites. Photoshop has quite a learning curve for someone like me as I try and edit and learn about using layers. Here is a flyer I created as an attempt for my PE.

Sunday, October 17, 2010

So often now teachers assign movie projects for different assignments in almost every subject and in my observations all the videos are starting to look alike. The student's also notice this as they get bored with doing the same thing using iMovie and most of them by now are so proficient in iMovie that they get bored with the projects or dislike them because they have done it before. So I thought it might be fun to try some After Effects with them to get them dabbling into something a little more powerful and different from what they are used to. This third example is a title sequence created in After Effects using a particle world effect and a camera to make the text appear to be in 3D space. I had the students create a title sequence for an introduction to any video that they do. They were excited about this, so here is a short video of what it looks like in After Effects and me putting it together.

For my second trial in Adobe After Effects I wanted to try some green screen effects out and try and manipulate the objects to do what I want within a scene for a re-creation of a movie trailer that some of my 8th grade students were doing. iMovie has a green screen feature that allows you to do some green screen effects, but you can not move the scale, postion, or rotate the objects to make the green screen look realistic. This makes it difficult to film for iMovie as you have to know the exact position of the camera in order to make the

objects fit. So, in After effects I wanted to work on keying out and rotating the objects to fit the scene. Here is a look of what it looks like in After Effects as you key out the green screen using the Effects/keying/keylight effect.

I could spend hours trying to figure out Adobe After Effects and attempting to be a professional video editor, which would be awesome. So I chose to try some things out this week in After Effects for my practical experience, So check out this link to my first attempt at an earth zoom effect. It appears that the high resolution zoomed in pictures of the city can not be picked up by the video plugins, so I apologize for the beginning. This is just a simple zoom out from my house in Seoul to a view of the whole world. This could be a cool effect to start a scene or end a scene or to just show people where you live.

Tuesday, October 12, 2010

Google sites can be used for many different things and has potential to be the one stop shop for your blogging, wiki, digital portfolio, media center..... Google offers this great web 2.0 tool and connects it to their apps suite so that it is always connected to your gmail or google account. When you click on my sites on the top of your google account you are able to create a new one or view ones that you have been invited to or that you own.

Once you are a part of a google site or you have created one you can begin building a website, a blog, or a whole host of different things that you might want to use a web page for. The awesome thing about google sites is that it gels and works so easily with everything google. So you can easily embed a video from youtube, a google doc, presentation, spreadsheet, drawing, form and everything else google with just a click of a button. Google Sites also has a lot of gadgets that you can add to your site that can engage your students or allow them to have a little fun.

Google sites is very easy to edit and will allow you to create a very nice looking and professional site that you can use for multiple things. There are many tutorials on how to use and edit google sites as well as how to use it in education. Like all things google it is easy to share and collaborate with other users. Like a wiki you can invite students to edit content on a page or between co workers you could work to create a grade level page and so on and so on. The collaboration part of google sites is what makes this pretty different from a lot of other sites, it is easy to share and to collaborate on a web page using google sites.

Wednesday, October 6, 2010

Creating a presentation where the students can input different forms of media and text in one spot is exactly what Animoto can do. So often students are asked to create a presentation where they have to deliver information on a certain subject through some use of a visual tool. Most of the time power point or keynote is chosen because that is what teachers are used to and that is the easiest thing for students do. Animoto changes this because now students can create a visually catching presentation that does not bore the rest of the class to death. This presentation tool allows the students to take images or video either created by them or borrowed from the internet and easily input it into a presentation that combined with audio and text creates a great presentation that keeps the attention of the class and displays comprehension of the subject. One great thing about Animoto is that it is so easy to input the different types of media through dragging and dropping the media, but then Animoto automatically organizes and creates amazing transitions that eliminates the need for the students to have to take the time to edit the presentation, they just have to input the information. I have seen the students completely change their attitudes towards giving a presentation to the class because when you create an Animoto project it should eliminate the need for the students to stand up in front of the class and talk to present the information. The students may need to give a introduction or conclusion to the presentation but besides that Animoto has made it nice and easy and powerful to change presentations for good.

Sunday, October 3, 2010

TitanPad is an online real time collaborator that can be used for many different things in the classrooms. TitanPad is the new version of what was EtherPad which was bought by google and shut down. TitanPad allows you to create a page where you can invite others by giving them a link. Once your collaborators have this link they are able to edit the page together with you in real time. The difference between TitanPad and Google Docs is very little, except for that you do not have to have a google account or set up any account of any type with TitanPad. This allows students to get together on a TitanPad and work together to come up with a story board, a plan for a project, to edit in real time a fellow student’s paper, to create a proposal for a group project, and all of this they can do from their homes and not have to try and schedule a time to meet outside of school. This is very important for students at my school who most of them don’t live any where near each other. They just need to have one person send the link to the rest of the people in the group and then they can edit the TitanPad together or separately on the same document. The last nice thing about TitanPad is that it allows you to download the document that you just created to a word or PDF file when you are done in order to submit it. TitanPad is awesome!